Since 1998 Rob Pruitt (1964, Washington DC) has been making deliberately repetitive use of the panda motif. Initially intended as a form of humour, this refrain is both a response to a host of emotions, sensibilities and causes and a publicising of an endangered species the artist first encountered in a personal political context: in 1972 the Chinese government gave two pandas to the Nixon White House in Pruitt’s home town, an event that contributed to the future artist’s innate fascination with the animal. Next year we will be celebrating the series’ first twenty years; and as long as there are pandas Rob Pruittwill paint them!

These days his panda comes camouflaged as «motivational posters» – or, for the purposes of the exhibition, under the heading «motivational pandas». Here our animal is associated with coaching and personal growth messages supposed to unleash motivation and even boost our self-knowledge. Their sources notably include the philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (author of the celebrated Walden; or, Life in the Woods); fashion personalities like Coco Chanel, who provides the title of the exhibition with the statement “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve“; and such emblematic pop culture figures as Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi and his famous “May the Force Be With you“.

All these «mantras» of encouragement have left behind the models pinned up on the walls of America’s offices, schools and hospitals and joined the ones here at Air de Paris. And this time the panda will even be there on the same footing as the viewer: a giant version seemingly locked into contemplation of a sunset or colours shading off into each other.“You Get The Face You Deserve“: the title of this fourth solo show comes from these “motivational pandas“, but it also chimes with the Artificial Intelligence Style Transfer Self-Portraits, a new series created with software whose smart algorithm takes the contours of the artist’s face and mixes them into the features of art history masters and icons. And so we see Pruitt daring a joyous face-to-face with David Hockney’s blue swimming pool, Bridget Riley’s signature stripes and the Fauvist curves of Henri Matisse.

In the light of a second reading of the exhibition title, the Polar Bears also seem to take on quite different meaning. The big white bear is an endangered species, too, and its presence here alongside statements from political or politically connoted figures – among them Barack Obama, Brian Eno, Desmond Tutu, Jane Goodall and Ansel Adams – comes as an manifesto reminding us of their ecological awareness their commitment in the urgent struggle against global warming.

Rob Pruitt (1964, Washington DC) lives and works in New York. In 2018, the Kunsthalle Zurich will be presenting a monographic exhibition of his work curated by Daniel Baumann. At the invitation of Bjarne Melgaard he is currently showing solo at the Rod Bianco Gallery in Oslo. He has had numerous other individual exhibitions, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, the Aspen Art Museum and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. «Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market», one of his most iconic projects, has featured in many venues around the world, including Palm Springs Art Museum (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2015), AplusA Gallery, Venice (2015), the Paris Mint (2012) and Tate Modern (2009).

How are you feeling? What are you thinking about? Listening to? Writing? Reading? Who has come to visit? I know it’s absolute torture for you to be stuck in the house. Can you role play? Pretend that you are a fragile but glamorous agoraphobic? Wear lipstick with your best nightgowns and listen to Bach at the highest volume? Write your memoirs, write poetry! Spencerian sonnets and sestinas! Deep down I know none of that will really work. You have the worst FOMO of anyone I know.

I don’t write letters, I only write emails. But for you, anything. Please don’t judge my handwriting. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to face all of these decisions like whether my “y’s” and “g’s” should be straight or curved, so I’ve included both for good measure. That’s me… always splitting the difference. Half the people I know call me Julie and the other half call me Julia. Not knowing my own name causes acute existential doubt, but I just can’t seem to grab the bull by the horns and decide on one or the other. I’ve internalized the ambiguity.

Instead of writing I wish I could beam myself to you. Or better yet, that you could be here with me. I know you love Paris — your home away from home. It feels strange to be here without you. But Paris is different now. All of your friends are gone. Not on holiday, but gone for good. No longer in the world. We felt it coming, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

On my 30th birthday you told me that your 30’s were your favorite decade and I felt so buoyant, so hopeful to have the best years of my life ahead of me. Now I’m halfway through it and I think maybe I’m doing something wrong. But I am droopy, depressive, cloudy, crippled with self doubt. Why couldn’t I have inherited your relentless optimism? When you were in Paris as a young woman I remember you telling me how your friends would call you “la veuve joyeuse.” I want to rewind the movie of your life back to that time. I guess I started shooting too late. But I can picture you with short dresses and long red hair. (I also wished I had inherited your legs). And of course the requisite red nail polish. Or maybe you thought nail polish was vulgar at that point. I can’t think of a time when I’ve seen you without red nails. I’m convinced they grow in red at this point. But I think that only became an obsession after you saw Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which came out in 1988 when I was six years old.

I’ve clung on to everything you’ve told me about your time in Paris in the 50’s and 60’s. Didn’t you say that you and Jess were in the Jardin Luxembourg when Truffaut was shooting 400 Blows? I’ve never looked for you two in the film because I would be too disappointed to find out that you didn’t make it on screen. I know you’re there, and that’s all that matters.

La Nouvelle Vague, le Nouveau Roman. I remember you saying how much you loved Nathalie Sarraute. Maybe it’s because she was a Russian Jew like us. Was she the one who wrote about a doorknob for five pages? From what I’ve read of her work, I love it too. In the same way I love Clarice Lispector or Jane Bowles. They can express all of the contradictions, anxiety and humor of inner life with scientific exactitude. Do you think Nathalie Sarraute read Jane Bowles, for instance?

This is from Sarraute’s The Planetarium:
“Five rooms and she’s entirely alone. But that’s just it, that’s where her madness lies. I was about to tell you… That’s the funny part. She never has any company. But she must have two parlors, a big dining room, a guest room… That’s why she’s always getting things ready, so as to invite people. Everything must be perfect, spotless: it probably seems to her that their eye is there, always, ready to seize upon the slightest mistake, every imperfection, every error in taste… People’s opinions frighten her so… It’s never perfect enough. Never entirely ready… she doesn’t want it to be. In reality, she doesn’t care to see anybody: what she needs, in fact, is this getting ready. For her, that suffices.”

I have those same anxieties, yet I’m still a mess. You told Davide that you went to someone’s place (he remembered it as Susan Sontag, but I don’t think it was her) and it was cluttered with piles of crap everywhere. Whoever it was told you that cleaning was tedious and anti-intellectual. I can see you really embraced that sentiment. I should just give in and embrace it too. It would save me a lot of energy.

One’s living environment, home, furniture, books, objects, are all so revealing. “What sofa really represents me as a person?” is a question I have asked myself more than once. Hint: oftentimes it is not the most functional. I have at least two (no, definitely three) pieces of unusable furniture in my modestly sized apartment. Why, you may ask? I suppose I find something beautiful and tragic about furniture that can’t be used. I picture the impossible body it would accommodate, I picture the thing as a body, anthropomorphized like Pee-Wee Herman’s chair, maybe a little sadder, always a little sleepy.

Speaking of sleepy, I’m sleepy. It’s six hours ahead here so I tend to stay up later than I should to feel closer to New York. I’m picturing you right now in your plush armchair, long, thin, perfectly pedicured feet resting on the ottoman. Your legs mirroring the painting next to you on the wall of your legs from fifty years ago. One hand is holding a kindle and the other is fidgeting an oversized ring. This is you. Inextricably connected to your environment, at least in my memory.

Almine Rech Gallery Paris is pleased to present “Life is Worth Living”, George Condo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, from October 14 through to November 18, 2017. This will be the artist’s first major showing in Paris since his sensational salon installation at the Grand Palais for the exhibition Picasso.mania in 2015.

Altérables is a project that consists of forming a series of images in the same process: images recovered from the printed press are photocopied and then retouched using one or more layers of transparent tracing paper, on each layer a drawing comes Duplicate, move or add an element, contour, etc. Present in the original image. The image thus modified is then scanned and put into another context and another medium undergoing the alterations due to the different transformation steps.

Since the creation of the Movement of New Realism in 1960, to which Daniel Spoerri belonged, this artist
embodies a major figure of modern and contemporary art.

The son of Dada and Duchamps, Daniel Spoerri likes to unbalance order, the hierarchy of values, beliefs, and preconceived ideas. Art and life mingle, the world is potentially a work of art, everyday objects, those found, hackneyed phrases are as many ready-mades full of meaning, affect and aesthetic. Everything is fetish. Everything is ritual. Everything is art. You only have to present, to “trap” the thing, as such. What is trivial, unworthy, vulgar,
trash, rubbish, doomed to death is put back, by chance, and mainly thanks to Spoerri’s will, into life cycle through art.

Daniel Spoerri, who is fully part of this movement, which claimed a “collective singularity”, published, in 1962, his first book, today a cult book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (re-edited this year by Nouvel Attila editions). In this work already, his friends Dieter Roth, Robert Filliou and Roland Topor intervened.

These exchanges with artists are a central feature of his work. This essential aspect will be seen thanks to the re-edition of a set of 22 postcards entitled monsters are inoffensive, first edited by Fluxus in 1967. In them, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou and Roland Topor take photographs, draw, and assemble.

40 years after “Crocodrome”, the inaugural exhibition of Centre Pompidou in 1977, in which Tinguely invited Daniel Spoerri to exhibit, for the first time, Le Musée Sentimental and La Boutique Aberrante, the visitor will be able to discover works done in the last thirty years, still never shown in France.

40 years later, this exhibition will be a unique opportunity to show Daniel Spoerri’s most important contribution, which has influenced artistic trends such as Pop Art, Fluxus, Neo Dada… and prove it is still at work today.

Art : Concept is pleased to present ICE ICE BABY by Adam McEwen. For his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, McEwen exhibits a group of works made using his emblematic methods and materials – primarily cellulose sponge and graphite – newly combining them to achieve disconcerting effects.

Stemming from the wreck and sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the show appropriates a group of historical photographs of the icebergs suspected at the time to have caused the disaster. These images, printed on a material that is both unexpected and deeply familiar (commonly found as kitchen sponge), claim both archival aspect and nostalgic imagery, creating a strange mix of historical gaze and subjective feelings. McEwen’s practice often delves into collective and cultural history and most particularly into its moments of failure and tragedies: one thinks of his gum paintings referring to German cities bombed in World War II (Bomber Harris, 2006-2010), his obituaries of living subjects, or his recreation in graphite of a family coffin carrier. McEwen’s work operates at the intersections of popular culture and personal mythology - in the case of the Titanic, his great-grand father was among the passengers who did not survived the shipwreck.

Avoiding morbid obsession, McEwen complicates our relation to death and disaster by injecting the funereal with humor and the uncanny. For whatever reasons, the wreck of the Titanic has ascended to the pantheon of disaster celebrity, a historical event that has become part of our popular imaginary, a trigger for both connection and detachment. McEwen exploits this paradoxical relationship by layering the historical imagery with three-dimensional objects that themselves possess a parallel notoriety: a toilet plunger, a drum cymbal or a hula hoop, each of which is, confusingly, just as well-known as the Titanic. The effect of this composite is to trigger a psychological unease, or to write a narrative which is uncontrolled and defined by the viewer, not unlike montage.

These absurd and often free associative confrontations – one might note the reference to the late 80s hit in the title of the show – inevitably create a new context for these icebergs. From suspects to victims, the icebergs are now subject to an impending disappearance, if not because of the sponge they are printed on, more surely because of another no less global and ongoing disaster.

_

Born in London in 1965, Adam McEwen lives and works in New York City. His recent solo exhibitions include: I Think I’m in Love, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2017); Tinnitus, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2016); Harvest, Petzel Gallery, New York (2016); Non-Alignment Pact, Art : Concept, Paris (2014). As curator, he has conceived various projects including Fresh Hell – Carte blanche à Adam McEwen at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2010).

Backslash is delighted to present SOMETIMES YOU LIVE TWICE, Clemens Wolf’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show features a selection of monumental pieces from the ”Parachute objects” series, made from old and dilapidated parachutes using an Arte Povera-style approach. The plastic-coated fabric, one of the Austrian artist’s favourite materials, is ideal for playing with shapes and colours, turning the work into an astonishing landscape of folds and tucks that draw and disconcert the eye.

When we examine Clemens Wolf’s obsessive and mysterious work, we realise that the surface of the pieces in this series, with its powerfully vivid palette, reveals a world that is almost organic. While the artist sees the fabric’s contractions as a stylised representation of decomposition and decay, the resin he uses to hold the folds in place gives the works a distinctive glossy aspect and an intensity that is brought out by the delicacy of the coiled up parachute cords. The choice of such a lightweight and aerial object as the parachute conjures up the fundamental notion of gravity.

With this series of “Parachute Objects”, Clemens Wolf places great importance on the frontier between painting, sculpture and drawing, proposing a deep-reaching reflection on the meaning of the creative act and the status of the artwork. The artist produces an uncompromising multiplicity of versions in a series haunted by his own history (he is a passionate parachutist). His artistic approach is rooted in the quest for perfection and the absolute that rejects all forms of figurative or narrative projection. Similar to abstract expressionism, this series of works brings to mind the compulsive explorations of John Chamberlain and Jackson Pollock. The idea, endlessly multiplied, conveys the artist’s acute sense of material and colour.

Clemens Wolf’s work has been awarded several prizes in Austria and exhibited in many countries, including Germany, Switzerland, China, Israel and the USA. His works are featured in numerous public collections in Austria, including the prestigious Essl Museum in Vienna.

Laurent Perbos’ work, in the pure tradition of the art of assemblage, questions how the ordinary things, once revisited, can be seen as a narrative rather than an image. A world where things were formally and philosophically metamorphosed creating mental and visual ambivalent work. The Babylone exhibition is built as an initiatic tale. Through the artist’s contemporary reading, the birds, the chrome-plated trusses from which hang flowery perpends, evoke the legendary city and the magnificient of its terraced gardens.

The Galerie Bernard Bouche is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works of José Pedro Croft starting from September 16.

In the sculptures of the Portuguese artist, he produces a precarious sense of balance between the stable and the unstable, which, according to the artist, “reflects the impermanent middle of the universe”.
Through the simple materials such as plaster, wood, glass or steel, Croft has an interest in the perception of sculpture and managing with the effects of light, shadow and reflections in order to create new volumes and an distorted sense of space. Thus, through its opposition, a dialectical tension between full and empty appears.

José Pedro Croft, born in 1957, is well represented in significant collections in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. In 2017, on the occasion of the Biennale de Venise, José Pedro Croft has represented le Portugal à la Villa Henriot (Giudecca) with an exhibition titled “Medida Incerta”.

Nick Mauss will present new mirrored panel works developed from his increasing interest in backdrops, mises-en-scène and modes of display responding to the site-specific of the gallery. Painted with either abstract gestural marks or loosely rendered figures, Mauss builds a tension between the intimate gesture of his drawing process and the potentiality of a scenic décor.

Mauss is currently developing a permanent public commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, USA and will be part of the Triennale di Milano in Milan. He recently had a solo exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal. Mauss’ work is part of the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Princeton Art Museum, USA and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.

Emblematic place of art brut, the house of the artists of the psychiatric hospital Gugging, near Vienna in Austria, revealed since its creation in 1981 by doctor Narvratil, some of the most important brut artists, among which August Walla whom we exhibited in 2015. We are less aware that David Bowie - who collected their works - found there the inspiration of his album Outside. For all these reasons, we are very proud to have gathered some of the most historic - even museum works - together with some of the most contemporary ones - of 9 of these artists : Laila Bachtiar, Johann Fischer, Helmut Hladisch, Johann Korec, Heinrich Reisenbauer, Günther Schützenhofer, Leopold Strobl, Oswald Tschirtner and August Walla.

(...)
Hélène Delprat is double, Actaeon-Diana, one who paints to assure us that painting still stands back from the noise, for having learned to lose itself. To lose.
One cannot say « no » without belonging to the world of the traveller Thomas Hutter, the young clerck in Nosferatu: « And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him. » But crossing the threshold can mean something more simple than any science of vampires, for all these stories of shadows, of cinema, of stairs, of hands, of love and skulls, call only for one salutatory formula : « Leave here everything you know, become unversed. And travel ! » There is no point looking for a source here: it is in what you do, and that is why Delprat never talks about her painting but only about all the stories that led her there and make the origin unstable. Being impertinent and extricating oneself from the danger of knowledge — this, surely, is the elegance of not saying, of letting people live and look. And, to end as she does with a big burst of laughter, where she still and always hides, here is a kick up the backside à
la Benjamin Péret in Derrière les fagots : (...) and the empty tin of sardines saw itself sainted / A heel hard in the face / and it’s a divinity / swimming in pure honey / ignoring the protozoa / the seahorses / the celestial pebbles that leap from one eye to another
(...)

Excerpt from « The universe is the ash of a dead god », written by Corinne Rondeau for the catalogue of Hélène Delprat’s solo show at La maison rouge « I Did It My Way », from June 23rd to September 17th 2017.
« Et ainsi de suite », in : Derrière les fagots, José Corti, Paris, 1961, p. 108.

Peter Robinson's new work is perhaps best described through negative definitions. It is anti-monumental, does not subscribe to high production values or heroic gestures and resists being easily interpreted. Subtlety, modesty and lightness of touch and are qualities that are put forward instead. A kind of proto-language is suggested one in which the both the letterforms and syntax still seem to be within the process of formation. The installation feels rigorous and intentional but in the same breath highly subjective placing it in a strange space between reason and intuition. Although adhering to gallery conditions the work is casually presented indexing Robinson's method of making his work in situ. This has the effect of blurring the boundaries between production and presentation, the studio and gallery essentially softening the authority of the white cube.

For his fourth exhibition in the gallery, Michel Aubry (1959, Fr) deploys a series of new productions between sculptures and furniture, sound installation and costume, drawing and ornamental carpets.
Meticulous artist, hunter of know-how in quest for perfection, Michel Aubry has been carrying out for over twenty years a programmatic work, above all centered around manufacturing processes.

Fascinated by the launeddas, a family of Sardinian musical instruments made from reeds, the artist is interested very early in their sonority and their music of oral tradition. His “Conversion Table” (1992), where a length of reed corresponds to a precise sound, allows him to create analogies between sounds and forms, between the invisible and the visible. She invested almost all of her work, from constructivist clothes and furniture put to music to the installations of three-dimensional “partitions”.Michel Aubry questions the boundaries between art and craftsmanship. His interest in manufacturing and know-how, launeddas but also constructivist furniture, led him to study every detail in order to “reinterpret” and “give new life” to the object. Difficult then not to bring his practice closer to that of a sculptor. In addition to sculpting sounds, Michel Aubry thinks and shapes wood, wax, metal and even fabric to express and bring out the score that animates them.

At a time when the art world is embracing choreography in all its forms, Gagosian is pleased to announce the fall presentation of William Forsythe's Choreographic Objects. This is Forsythe's first exhibition with the gallery.

William Forsythe is a radical innovator in choreography and dance, revered the world over, and with an ardent and long-standing following in France. Over four decades, he has redefined the very syntax and praxis of his field, and exerted unparalleled influence on subsequent generations of artists. In the course of his singular career, he has developed an extensive repertoire of groundbreaking ballet choreographies and experimental, non-proscenium-based dance-theater works, as well as an open-access digital platform for dance analysis, notation, and improvisation.

Parallel with the evolution of his choreographic performances, Forsythe has been working for more than twenty years on installations, film works, and discrete, interactive sculptures that he calls “choreographic objects”—beginning in 1989 with The Books of Groningen, a permanent outdoor collaboration with architect Daniel Libeskind. Consistent with his expanded conceptual aim of summoning unconscious choreographic competencies in lay participants, the Choreographic Objects prompt an intensified engagement with their given environments. Early examples—Instructions, City of Abstracts, and Scattered Crowd—were presented at Nuit Blanche in Paris in 2003.

Located in the grounds of an active airport that is also home to the Museum of Air and Space, Gagosian Le Bourget provides an ideal context for Forsythe's Choreographic Objects, especially the thrilling and majestic Black Flags (2015), a 21-minute duet for two industrial robots, originally commissioned by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Wielding huge silken banners that furl and unfurl through the air like heraldic standards, the two whirring robots come together in parallel, synchronic action, then separate and digress; when they eventually find unison again, it is in stately, deathly counterpoint. In total contrast to this mesmerizing dark spectacle is a small-scale work Towards the Diagnostic Gaze, with which visitors are invited to engage. A feather duster becomes the focus of human will as viewers are invited to grasp hold of it and still its nervous energies. Alignigung is the latest in a series of video installations that Forsythe has created in collaboration with some of the world's greatest dancers. Two dancers—Rauf “Rubber Legs” Yasit and Riley Watts, a former Forsythe Company dancer—grasp each other in complex entanglements, generating optical conundrums where it is difficult to determine where one body ends and the other begins.

None of these works has previously been exhibited in Paris. For this year's Festival d'automne, in December Forsythe will also participate with Ryoji Ikeda in the collaborative project “William Forsythe x Ryoji Ikeda” at La Villette/Grande Halle with a large-scale work Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No. 2, a vast field of suspended pendulums through which participants are invited to move and, in so doing, generate an infinite range of individual choreographies.

William Forsythe was born in New York in 1949, and resides in Vermont, U.S.A.

Forsythe was Resident Choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet from 1976–1984, and director of the Ballet Frankfurt from 1984–2004, where he created works such as Artifact (1984), Limb’s Theorem (1990), The Loss of Small Detail (1991), Eidos:Telos (1995), Kammer/Kammer (2000), and Decreation (2003). His works are featured in the repertoire of many of the world’s major ballet companies including Paris Opera Ballet; Mariinsky Ballet, St. Petersburg; Semperoper Ballet, Dresden; Royal Ballet, London; New York City Ballet; San Francisco Ballet; Boston Ballet; and the National Ballet of Canada. Forsythe established and directed The Forsythe Company from 2005 to 2015. Works include Three Atmospheric Studies (2005), You made me a monster (2005), Human Writes (2005), Heterotopia (2006), The Defenders (2007), Yes we can’t (2008/2010), I don’t believe in outer space (2008), The Returns (2009) and Sider (2011). Most recently he was Artistic Advisor to the Paris Opera.

Notably, Forsythe has developed new approaches to dance documentation, research, and education. His 1994 computer application Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, developed with the ZKM / Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, is used as a teaching tool by professional companies, dance conservatories, universities, postgraduate architecture programs, and secondary schools worldwide. 2009 marked the launch of Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced, a digital online score developed with The Ohio State University that reveals the organizational principles of the choreography and demonstrates their possible application within other disciplines. It was the pilot project for Forsythe's Motion Bank, a research platform focused on the creation and research of online digital scores in collaboration with guest choreographers.

Forsythe has received the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres from the French government (1999); the Hessische Kulturpreis/Hessian Culture Award (1995); the German Distinguished Service Cross (1997); the Wexner Prize (2002); the Golden Lion of the Biennale di Venezia (2010); Samuel H Scripps / American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012); and the Grand Prix de la SACD (2016).

In 2002, he was the founding Dance Mentor for The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. He is an Honorary Fellow at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London and holds an Honorary Doctorate from The Juilliard School in New York. Currently he is Professor of Dance and Artistic Advisor to the Choreographic Institute at the University of Southern California’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance.